Strategies for Business Sustainability in a Collaborative Economy

The increasingly complex and turbulent 21st century work environment poses challenges for businesses that can threaten their long-term sustainability. Given the rapid developments in technology, increasing rates of employee turnover, skills shortages, and changing expectations from Generation Z, the youngest generation now entering the workforce, organizations are recognizing the importance of developing a career resilient workforce. Individual employees' career resilience frames their capacity to respond when faced with career challenges, allowing them to continue functioning effectively, adapt in a flexible manner, and to successfully deliver work outcomes. To sustain a resilient workforce, managers must actively plan, develop, and deploy human resource management initiatives aimed at instilling career resilience in the youngest workplace entrants. By strategically designing generationally-appropriate management practices to maximize Generation Z talent, organizations can bolster their business sustainability to remain competitive in the changing economy.

Family Duties and Job Flexibility: Tradeoffs for Chinese Urban, Educated Mothers with Toddlers

Drawing on survey and interview data from mothers of 14-month infants in Nanjing, China, we explore women’s job trajectories as they juggle work and family responsibilities. Four profiles that emerge among our sample of 371 mothers (high stability, rapid cyclers, high-paid wage-growth, and intermittent) reflected not only their work career trajectories but also their different strategies of managing work-family balance. High-stability mothers were more likely than the other three groups to work in state-owned enterprises and experience a negative work climate. They illustrate how China’s changing economy shape work preferences of mothers who value interest and self-fulfillment, but pursue stability to accommodate their childrearing responsibilities.

Culture education-based model for the modern organisation

Aim. The aim of the research is to support the organisation’s management through raising awareness on cultural diversity in the multicultural environment, and presenting a complex model covering the cultural issues in the multicultural organisation. Methods. The model has been developed based on the research carried out between 2018 and 2021 in the Cultural Risk in the Organisation in the Globalisation Era – Competences vs. Reality project. The author used literature review and a survey questionnaire as research methods. To develop the model for staff management at a multicultural organisation, a survey questionnaire directed to 154 staff members of multicultural organisations in five countries (Poland, Italy, Latvia, Cyprus, and the UK) was used. Results. As a result of the analysis, the following key areas have been identified: cross-cultural awareness, understanding different cultures, stereotypes, communication, teamwork, leadership and hierarchy, learning styles, and qualities in the workplace. The improvement of the staff in the aforementioned areas makes them more aware of the cultural diversity in organisations and of different cultural risks that may occur. Conclusions. There is a strong need for a continued consideration and improvement of the awareness regarding cultural diversity, as it is an element of modern and changing economy which may influence the continuity of every organisation. Cognitive value. Key topics related to competences for mitigating cultural risks were identified. They were used as elements of the complex model which can be used at a multicultural organisation in the process of training the staff in the area of cultural diversity.

Conclusions

This chapter closes this book by summarizing the arguments made in the previous chapters and considering the implications for the study of language and political economy. Subjectivities of English in neoliberalism jointly work to present neoliberal subjecthood as the ideal way of living, thereby rationalizing the structures of control inherent in neoliberalism. Research on language and political economy has much to gain by attending to aspects of subjectivity that underlie the way language gets incorporated into the conditions of the changing economy, as language serves as an important channel through which neoliberalism extends its control over our minds, bodies, and sense of being. For this, we need to recognize that subjective experiences of being a language user is fraught with tensions based on material relations, and make them a serious focus for the study of language and political economy.

Global Skills After COVID-19

COVID-19 has profoundly reshaped our world. The disruption to lives and livelihoods has been staggering. The economic devastation has thrown many industries into survival mode. As we begin to revive jobs and economies, it will be important to understand the impact of the crisis on the skills landscape. Universities among the ones adapting to the crisis. Equal access to education and skills is one of them. COVID-19 has further exposed many inequalities with respect to education and employability .Online learning has proven effective in delivering on that promise, now more than ever. From March to July of this year, more than 15 million new learners registered on different courses. School closures have disrupted higher education for millions of students in countries already in need of more accessible learning. Eighty percent of students enrolled in tertiary education are located in countries that have both closed schools due to COVID-19 and are in the bottom half of the world rankings for proficiency in business, technology, and data science skills. To help overcome deepening skill inequities, institutions must work together to democratize access to quality online learning resources and ensure we are all prepared for the rapidly changing economy.

MATERIAL SELECTION AS COOPERATIVE PROCESS: A FRAMEWORK PROPOSAL FOR A CHANGING ECONOMY

In current era of Anthropocene, human activities and their consequences on Earth ecosystems are under the lens of scientific research. Researchers in every field of study are trying to find alternatives to promote sustainable development. So it is for design, where researchers exploiting the problem-framing and problem-solving nature of the design discipline itself, trying to find new methodologies and tools to enhance sustainable development.One of the most important tasks in the design for a sustainable production is focused on material selection. In this paper, authors will present a reflection upon material selection methods and an overview of existing material repositories. Traditionally, material selection is usually attributed to designers or technical professionals but nowadays information concurring in materials selection became a complex task to manage. Therefore, authors propose a case study concerning information management upon materials and their selection presented in a new possible approach: material selection as a collaborative task between several departments of an industrial company, to promote an aware information management activity upon materials.

Financial Crises in American History

U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.

Appropriate Budgetary Policy for a Changing Economy

The XXI century's contemporary challenges and crises indicate that fiscal policy is an appropriate tool for countercyclical regulation, ensuring sustainable economic growth and social justice. In this regard, society's requirements for the quality of budgetary policy have changed, which has shifted the focus in setting goals and choosing tools for its implementation from the position of ensuring sustainable economic growth and the principles of fair distribution of income. The analysis allows us to conclude that to ensure the proper quality of budgetary policy, its goals and objectives must correspond to the strategic goals of developing public law education, and coordination of budgetary and monetary policy is necessary. To achieve the goals of justice, the author of the article propose to differentiate the instruments of inter-budgetary reallocation of funds depending on the level of debt sustainability of the regions and to use targeted grants to motivate the authorities of public law entities to ensure sustainable socio-economic development. The article shows that for improvement of the formation mechanism of state programs and national projects and budget efficiency growth, it is necessary to monitor the compliance of tax expenditures and budget subsidies with the target indicators of state programs.